The Plausibly Deniable DataBase (PDDB): It’s Real Now
bunniestudios.com
bunniestudios.com
Um, no?
Don't app devs do stuff like this all the time?
E.g., hm I'm in a hurry so why don't I just plunk down some JSON from the last known state of this super handy feature to disk so its ready at startup?
Also, I wrote this a gazillion years before anyone even suggested the existence of plausibly-deniable anything.
Also, I farted this pattern all over the whole app that is now somehow critical U.S. digital infrastructure, and I don't answer emails anymore after moving to Tahiti to build experimental percussion instruments out of driftwood...
If you are the kind of person that would actually need this, it may not be safe to use it until it becomes a standard feature.
First ring, personal data, family photos,....
First hidden "volume" - banking data, credit card info,...
Second hidden "volume" - dick pics, some embarrasing porn
Third hidden "volume" - atom bomb plans or whatever you're actually tryng to hide.
A nuclear bomb just has to bring a critical mass of material together. For Uranium 235, that's about 104 pounds. You typically do it by splitting it into 4 pieces, and stick something like dynamite to each one so that when they go off it goes together and goes boom.
A hydrogen bomb is an ellipsoid made of aluminum foil with a nuclear bomb at one focus and heavy water at the other. The flash from the nuclear bomb hits the foil, and refocuses on the water that makes for a substantially larger boom.
This is all well-known. The trick is getting a sufficient supply of enriched uranium. The principles of how to do that are described in https://fas.org/issues/nonproliferation-counterproliferation.... Note that operating with elemental fluorine is dangerous to your health, and the necessary centrifuges WILL be spotted by US satellites, who are unlikely to be sympathetic with your desire to build a nuclear arsenal.
The fourth ring or fifth ring is where it starts getting interesting.
I could build Twitter in a weekend!
(It's never as simple as there executive-level "big picture" makes it sound...)
In theory, you have a rough design for an assembly.
In practice, there is still more than enough knowledge missing to keep you blowing holes in/irradiating the countryside for quite sometime to come, and that's being generous, and granting no one actively interferes with your efforts at building a cache of recreational McNukes.
"Oh that? I installed it after seeing an article on Hacker News. Here are credentials. There is nothing really there."
They use your credentials, see extra data that shows you played around with it, and have no reason to suspect that there is a DIFFERENT set of credentials which would give your ACTUAL secrets.
The more HN people actually download and try it out, the more plausible the deniability that I just offered becomes.
There is no actual safety from nation-states or other sufficiently-resourced attackers.
My point is that if you're being subjected to the rubber-hose treatment, nothing's going to get you out of it. Any actor who will start down that path will likely take it all the way to the finish, extracting whatever value they can from you until there's none left to extract.
As soon as the torturer tells you that they don't know how many secrets you have, you can just say "Whelp, guess I'll just die then" and spend the rest of your hopefully-short life wondering why they don't understand that the only motivation you had to speak was the possibility that the torture would stop.
In reality, though, most regimes that would be willing to torture you would do it even if they knew you didn't have any secrets, just to make an example of you to deter your allies, or they wouldn't need the information you had because they could just tell a judge to convict you on falsified evidence, or tell the public that you shot yourself in the back of the head 8 times.
For the few use cases where there is some vital secret that you don't want the government to know, and they are willing to use torture to find it out, you make sure that the secret is encrypted with a key that is split between multiple (mutually unknown) people across multiple jurisdictions, so that there is no harm in divulging your portion of the key the moment you are caught.
The torturer has no reason to divulge anything at all to you, let alone useful information like "we're moot sure what information we're looking for." I doubt any target would ever hear that.
> you make sure that the secret is encrypted with a key that is split between multiple (mutually unknown) people across multiple jurisdictions, so that there is no harm in divulging your portion of the key the moment you are caught.
If you actually know the secret, they're torturing you for that, not your encryption keys.
As for beating torture, there is a technique which Marines headed into battle are taught (heard about it from my brother who served in Vietnam). What you do is pretend to break before you really do, and tell some interesting lies. By the time you ACTUALLY break, you won't know truth from fiction, and will happily add details you can to whatever story that you think they want to hear. Which will very likely be a fantasy built on those lies.
Even if you don't know the technique, this can happen accidentally. The result is that information obtained under torture is unreliable. Which is the biggest reason that most countries stopped using it.
For me the hard part was first noticing I was being tortured on days of which I had no recollection. Like "Wednesday? But it was just Sunday." So on those two days the torturers wake you up on roofies, keep you dosed all day long, and put you to sleep on roofies (might not be a bad sleeping aid). In the first person you have no idea a day just passed. Just like that, one less day in your biography. They do it up to 29 times, because women pick up on the bullshit if their period is out of phase (though it takes decades to solve mysteries of this nature, unreliable detective). Plus, after 29 days the martyr might notice, like "hey the fuck is this extra month in this calendar? April 2009? Why don't I know anything about that month. I never heard of that month." So also they can talk to you while on roofies and it's like the old random-access-memories, reading deletes what you read. So they can ask you about Clockwork Orange, or fucking show you Clockwork Orange, just like in Clockwork Orange. Or read 1984 out loud to you while electrocuting you with a car battery, did that to me, like Live-Action Role Playing O'Brien's torture--in which he claims he's performing medicine for the mentally ill with intentional malpractice. And you have no idea until you realize there's holes in your memory and--for instance--a law student friend asked me if it was like Clockwork Orange and I said...I think so, what happens in that? He told me and saw me flash, a distinct emotion of a long-buried memory. Not truly deleted, just removed from the index and has nothing pointing to it, so it can only be remembered in a super-indirect way.
Then one day you read 1984 again and see I remember this I don't remember that--and I had read it twice pre-torture, fuck knows how much during torture, then again recently, and normally I'd remember all of it perfectly but there were huge gaps in which I doubted ever having reading. I have similar to photographic memory, call it holographic memory, and secondly I read that book in the 7th grade and again in freshman year in a class about Utopias. No recollection of that many passages means they clearly read it out loud to delete all that.
Oh well not bitter about being tortured. Just wish I could remember the intense moments, I feel cheated by the roofies.
They did let me read Hacker News though, while inside the torture ward. They have a little cluster of PCs which they keylog to get your passwords and impersonate you to the outside world, rob you, and in one case say my suicide note to a friend was just a joke. So don't use computers while tortured.
But hey a little Hacker News brightened up my day every once in a while, take the good with the bad, if you're forced to.
Who did this to you, and where?
Nobody actually gives one unit of fuck. Nobody actually traveled overseas to visit me see how I was doing and check on me face to face. It's like, oh you're on the train to hell, you're seated and strapped in, well good luck! Don't even actually wish you good luck. Say "good luck!" don't even mean it, it would be cool if they did it would be worth one unit of fuck, all I need for bail out of the torture ward, but they don't actually want that for me.
I did notify people but after the false messages saying I was totally fine I never got through to any of those people in Stanford again. I guess they think I was fucking with them. Whole class of '12. One time, a tiny bit, not more. Always grasping at straws, never someone saying "OK let's talk for an hour since you disappeared." Never got through to Larkin 08-09, nobody. Literally nobody, couldn't get through to Elliott Liu, or any of the women who said they'd retaliate for my lynching like Rose or there were a few others, none of the blondes who were attracted to me, a little bit to Matthew Kahane, Stanford '12, who sympathized, and who else, Ben Schley, also Stanford '12, also talked to me, provided testimony, that was cool, otherwise a hundred people (many of whom were forcibly deleted from memory). But nobody put themselves through so much as a millionth of the suffering I went through to help me. Kind of unbelievable, don't answer their emails, now obviously I'm also conditioned to communicate to them very poorly that's part of the program in the torture, but come on. The well got poisoned, fine, the comms got fucked, fine, but really? No interest in how this guy's life got fucked up? Can't look me up and see I never graduated? Too fat a roledex for sad stories?
Like they see me they react like I'm homeless or haunted. In fact one day I made major moves to help an evicted (meaning homeless) guy out and he told me his whole story and I listened and that's when I realized how people react to my story when I tell it. But the basic premise is the same: everybody is waiting for someone above them to reach down and pick them up from where they are, nobody picks anybody up who's beneath them.
[EDIT: that was my insight, reach down, not up, help someone who is in hell relative to me! I helped Jonathan Ramos, really cool guy, been in Chilean prison, lived on the street, and I was like, hell he's sitting on the pavement I'm wearing upper-class Chilean clothing, why not just pay out whatever he asks, every time? What's impeding me from pulling him out of hell? Worked too, he recently got into a homeless shelter--a bullshit thing in my book, rent should be cheap so that everybody can have a home--and though I thought he was dead because he disappeared for three weeks, he showed up again asking for cash for a bus pass to go work. I said of course! I told him to come with me, we went I got myself an energy drink, got a coke instead so there was more change for him, gave him $4 in singles (bus pass is $9) so he could find that job. Pulled him out of hell.]
Like I shouldn't have fought as hard as I did to never formally become homeless, if those closest to me will refuse to talk to me as if I did anyway, why not sleep under a bridge? WHY THE FUCK NOT? Makes no difference as far as stigma, I'm tough I can survive, why did I plead to not be evicted hundreds of times, cooperate with poisoners hundreds of times? It's not like Larkin 08-09 gives a fuck about me anyway like I did for them. Shows you how little people lose not getting into an Ivy League school, fair-weather friends. Although I did get disappeared very thoroughly, it was particularly foul weather. But come on take a motherfucking call!
I think people hear words and trigger, like rape accusation ewww, get away from me, like immolation ewww, talk to a doctor. Or torture, ewww, don't want to get tortured, talk to a doctor. Duh there's torture in Chile, but ewww I'd rather donate a hundred bucks to ACLU as if that mattered a fuck. Don't want to risk my cushy perfect American life and get on a plane, torture is a South America thing, you asked for it by leaving America when you were 9 months old to live under a dictatorship.
Who did this? Where? You actually want to know? Well if a bot wants to know, which is always the worst case on a forum, fuck that may not be somebody but it's something, I'll take it.
Dr. Jorge Barros Beck, Christus San Carlos de Apoquindo, Santiago, Chile. March 29, 2009, to roughly June 6, 2009.
If they’ve already decided to use a couple of well placed jumper cables, you’re past the point this is likely to be helpful. It seems the purpose of this is to avoid it getting to that point.
For me this is appealing going through airports and the like. The TSA is unlikely to jump straight to rubber hose analysis but, for a concrete real-world example, they will readily have the DEA intercept you on the way to your terminal if they suspect you’re carrying a financial instrument worth $10K+ on your person. And that’s just the US. As a US citizen traveling to China, there are plenty of use cases I could imagine for needing to move information that are only a problem once an official suspects you have something of value on the device. A concrete example that might resonate with the HN crowd: traveling between nation states with ssh credentials for your company’s infrastructure.
I can see this being useful against nation states if the goal is to avoid initial suspicion. If they’re already interested in you the game may very well already be up.
Take a password, use some key stretching. Interpret the result: 0 indicates measure up-down. 1 indicates measure left-right. Measure qubits using this pattern. Get harddrive encryption key.
If as a prisoner you lie to your captors and they fall for it, they will measure the wrong way and the harddrive key is destroyed forever. They way qubits work you only get one attempt.
Or am I missing something?
And now you have a "good" justification for using a PDDB to keep your shame hidden, and the layer below _that_ holding the corporate secrets you're trying to auction off can't be proven in any reasonable way (from the disk. I'm sure it's obvious by this point that I'm no expert on corporate espionage, but there are plenty of other ways you'll get caught).
I mean, if you're not the kind of person that would use something like this anyway, then people will always _suspect_ you have something deeper in there (even if you don't). But they won't be able to prove it - that's the goal.
Once a target has shown that they have hidden something at a lower level, which only they were able to demonstrate existed, the attacker knows the target has prepared an in-depth plausibly-deniable defense.
They will therefore have no reason to trust the target's claims that "No really, that's the worst thing I have," and will have a very strong reason to doubt it.